What Makes Us a People?
In this week’s parasha, Ki Tavo, Moshe makes a striking declaration:
“Pay attention and listen, Israel: This day you have become a people to Hashem, your God.”
“This day”? Had the Jewish people not become a nation long before?
Chazal explain that Torah must always feel new to us: “Every day, they should be in your eyes as if they were given today.” Our covenant with Hashem is not simply something that happened thousands of years ago. Every generation must receive it for itself.
That message is particularly powerful at this moment in Jewish history. Moshe is speaking to a generation standing on the threshold of Eretz Yisrael. They had already left Egypt and received the Torah, but they had not yet entered the Land.
And it is precisely here that Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch makes a remarkable observation. What makes us a people?
The Torah had already been given. The Land was still to come.
Yet Moshe says, “This day you have become a people.”
It is not the possession of a shared land, Rav Hirsch explains, that ultimately creates the Jewish people. It is our shared covenant, our collective commitment to Torah and to Hashem.
Jewish history would prove just how powerful that idea is. We would lose sovereignty, be exiled from our Land, and scatter across continents. But we would never cease to be a people.
Eretz Yisrael is our eternal homeland. But the covenant of Torah is the bond that has held us together wherever we have been, connecting Jew to Jew and generation to generation.
Perhaps that is why Moshe says “today.”
Because the covenant cannot remain yesterday’s story.
Every generation must make it theirs.
Every Jew must make it theirs.
And every day, we become a people anew.